


Nicola and Lawrie Divided

by scarletlobster



Category: The Marlows - Antonia Forest
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-23
Updated: 2014-11-23
Packaged: 2018-02-26 17:40:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2660738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scarletlobster/pseuds/scarletlobster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nicola's first summer term at Kingscote School, and she has to come to terms with Lawrie not being there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nicola and Lawrie Divided

**Author's Note:**

  * For [the_antichris](https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_antichris/gifts).



### Nicola and Lawrie Divided

The normal procedure on the first day of term was for everyone to do everything at double speed, so Nicola, sitting on her bed and pretending to look through her holiday prep to hide the fact that there was no one she particularly wanted to speak to, became increasingly aware that both Rowan and Ann were taking an awfully long time to do their unpacking. That they were taking so long because they were concerned about her, and each was privately waiting for the other to finish and leave the room, she had no idea. Rowan knew herself to be the person Nicola actually would choose to talk to, if (which was by no means certain) she wanted to talk to anyone. Ann, meanwhile, had a long-standing point to prove. When Nicola was still tiny, Karen and Rowan had tacitly adopted one twin each; Ann would have loved to have had a twin of her own, but the supply had run out after Rowan’s. Even ten years on, she was unable to let go of the idea that her gentle patience might prove a more welcome approach to Nicola in distress than Rowan’s bluntness. 

Eventually Ann spoke. “We could move the beds around a bit if you like? So you don’t have an empty bed each side of you? Or I don’t mind at all if you would rather swap and have the window bed.”

“Thanks, I’m fine,” said Nicola, shooting for nonchalant, but only getting as far as subdued. As a matter of fact, it was kind of Ann, as it was nice of her to make such herculean efforts not to keep saying sympathetic things. But the two unmade-up beds made the room look quite beastly and the very last thing Nicola felt like just now was to racket round downstairs with everyone screaming their heads off. What she really wanted to do was sit very, very quietly on her bed until Lawrie came back.

“Come for a swim later?” asked Rowan. That _was_ an honour: school etiquette was that seniors never invited juniors along to anything, even sisters, even for something they were probably going to do anyway. And Nicola thought she might. Rowan would perhaps talk her through the breathing thing before she turned blue. She leaned back against the wall, suddenly deciding that she might as well talk to her sisters, since they had a better chance of understanding than anyone else. 

“Tim’s been put in IIIA.”

There was a short pause while Rowan and Ann thought through the ramifications. “And Lawrie’s…?”

“IIIB. Which she knew she would be, only we thought Tim would be as well. It must be ‘cos Tim got two honours.”

“If Lawrie stays away until half term, she’ll be in the remove, not B.” said Rowan. Nicola stared at her.

“She can’t be! There’s no one left in the remove, hardly! There’s about three people, and on the sheet it says they’ll do most lessons with B!”

“Yes,” explained Rowan patiently, “that is how it works. It’s only up til’, ooh, about now, that the 3rd remove is a whole form on its own for gels who haven’t quite got the Kingscote spirit yet, don’t you know.. From now on it’s just a coaching group for people who have missed masses of school, or have come from abroad and done completely different work so far, that kind of thing. If she stays at home more than a couple of weeks, Gin will probably be put in Middle Remove, and that only has about three people in as well.”

“Gin? But Gin’s always been in an A form! She’ll go mad if they put her in remove!”

“Then she’ll have to go mad. If you want to sail through school in an A form all the way, you have to do little things like actually go to school.” Rowan was not at all convinced that Ginty was best served by sitting at home looking fragile, and thought, with some reason, that the safe routine of school might have cheered her up. Still, not her affair.

Nicola dismissed Ginty from her mind for now; she was sorry, of course, that Ginty had been so badly rattled by the Easter holiday contretemps, but Lawrie was the one who mattered more. “Thing is, Lawrie won’t care what form she is in – _Two_ B if they want – but she can’t do without me _and_ Tim. You know she can’t.” 

“But she can still see both of you,” said Ann. “And you’ll be with her every evening after dinner.”

“Yes, but no, that’s rubbish and you know it. It would mean seeing her for about an hour a day and she would have to see me and Tim at the same table for meals and going from lesson to lesson together while she festered with people like Marie Dobson.” Nicola hated anyone thinking ill of her twin, but Rowan and Ann knew how badly she would deal with it.

Rowan sighed. “I’m afraid she’d just have to survive. People do. And you might as well know, by the lower IVth it’s much harder to move up from B to A; they don’t do Latin in the middle B forms, and only combined science, so you have to be really stupendous to move from one to t’other. Gin’ll probably be all right because she’s done two terms in her A form, but if Lawrie wants to be with you, this is the term to do it.” 

“Lawrie will make new friends,” said Ann. “Everyone does in the end. Think of Rowan – she had the same best friend from when she was only nine, then she suddenly moved 6000 miles away, and Ro didn’t curl up and die, did she?”

“No, but she didn’t mind really _speciall_ …”

Nicola tailed off, mid-word; Rowan was giving her a ‘what have we here’ look, and Nicola realized, with mild surprise, that even seniors might have feelings. And come to think of it, Rowan had never really had a close friend this year, but she always seemed to be with people, so you didn’t notice. 

“I was thinking Tim might get herself put down to B if Lawrie is,” she said. 

“She won’t.” said Rowan.

“I think she will, Last term she never seemed to stop telling me that I must, and how easy it would be.” 

“She still won’t. Betcha. Go and see what she says. And when you have proved me right, I’ll see you down at the pool. Say, half an hour?”

Disconcertingly, it began to look as if Rowan was right. Tim, who had told Nicola on a daily basis – sometimes an _hourly_ basis – how easy and how essential it would be to come back to third remove until they were all ready to move up together, found it unexpectedly unpleasant to imagine deliberately doing poor work to wangle a move down to IIIB. She didn’t at all mind being a brilliant eccentric in the third remove, but if it was time to hatch from the third remove egg she very much wanted it to be as an A and not a B. 

“The thing is,” she said, “we have to make sure Lawrie comes back to IIIA. “

“How on earth are we going to do that? We’re here doing lessons and she’s at home getting worksheets.”

Tim tapped her teeth with a pencil. “When she comes back they’ll give her tests. You can do them for her. We all know Miller is as blind as a bat. Well, she wears glasses anyway. P’raps we could hide her glasses to make sure.”

“Forevermore, Tim! If we do that, Lawrie will be in 3rd remove-and-B and I will be in 3rd train home and don’t come back. We probably won’t even look the same by then. If she has her hair cut it will be by a hairdresser with a pair of actual scissors in Hampstead and I’ll have been to Blind Betty and her Scythe.” 

Tim contemplated the hairdresser who visited the school and saw Nicola’s point. “Well we’ll have to teach her by post. Then over half term you can do a super massive stupendous catch up. “

“In four days.”

“Yes, _but_ , like I say, we can send her things by post. She can learn anything that looks like a play. Remember how quickly she got all the Prince and the Pauper lines. It was like watching an elephant sucking up water in its trunk. So all we have to do is, whatever we learn, we write it out as a play – or some poetry - and tell her to learn it. We can do either Julius Caesar or In Memoriam and kill two birds with one stone, cos she’ll be covering literature _and_ whatever else she needs to learn.”

“You want me to write things like describe how a simple motor works so’s it looks like a bit of Julius Caesar?”

“Yes!” Tim saw that Nick looked deeply unconvinced. “You’re good at English! We both are! Anything can be iambic if you put a bit of beef into it!”

Nicola was barely persuaded. But after a term when Tim had barely spoken to her, it was rather heartening to have her back; she had forgotten how cheerfully confident Tim could be, particularly as Nicola’s form neighbour and partner for the spring term had been the Trappist Meg Hopkins. And Tim’s idea was bonkers, but something might be done, which was better than the nothing that Rowan and Ann had suggested. She went off to get her swimming things in a better frame of mind than she had been in for ages. 

In spite of her double dose of prep – and the horrible reams of doggerel which were all she could contrive for Lawrie – Nicola’s term started better than she had feared. Tim was at her best, and even though Nicola knew that she might vanish from human ken again when Lawrie came back, it was, for the time being, nice to have a friend who laughed at the same things. And cricket was a thing. It took two weeks for the weather to provide a half-decent day, and another week before they could risk cricket without turning beautifully mown grass into primeval swampland, but when cricket did start, Nicola felt like a snake shedding its skin and emerging with a much brighter, fresher one. 

She had only ever played with her family before, and assumed, in spite the fact that her three eldest sisters were sometimes kind when they played against her, that she was a bit weak and slow. Peter only had one way of playing any sport, which was to the death, and Giles had always absolutely slaughtered her without mercy. So when Craven said she wanted Nicola to try and deal with some fast bowling, Nicola found it hard not to laugh. Third form fast bowling, she discovered, was the sort of thing Giles would have dispatched if he had been obliged to bowl with a spoon. In her first real match, against the combined seconds, Nicola managed to score 36 from one over, a feat which did not so much make those members of staff who were watching applaud as burst out laughing. She was puzzled, but pleased, to discover that she was doubling as a promising cricketer and a welcome comic turn. 

At the dinner table that night, just as she was debating opening a letter from Lawrie (perhaps on second thoughts she would keep it until after dinner), Lawrie’s inamorata (a word Nicola had heard and liked, but was still not too sure about) Margaret Jessop actually stopped to offer warm congratulations, and to share the staff view that it had been funny to watch. 

“Tell Lawrie that we need her to come back and play as well,” she said, and out of all the messages she had been given to pass on, Nicola thought she might actually send that one.

_Dear Nick PLEASE no more Julius Caesar stuff. I did learn the stuff about gold and potatoes but it was an awful fag to learn._

Nicola recognised the description of Jennings’ ‘What were the results of the discovery of the new world?’ as embedded in Mark Antony’s address to the Roman citizens, and thought with some indignation that it had been a _really_ awful fag to _write._

 _Ma has said she will go through Jules C with me because it was her matric play (we did Act 1 on Saturday, but she was asleep for most of it.) Could you put stuff in In Memorium from now on because it’s miles easier to learn, and I thought it’s more important to learn Miller’s stuff than Kempe’s. Miller has sent me a load of pig-poo about noun phrases and modifiers, so if you could work that in it would be great._

Oh lor’, thought Nicola. But actually, it wasn’t a stupid idea. If Miller was the one who decided forms, it was only good politics to make sure Lawrie did her subject best. 

_I haven’t been spending much time with Gin. Ma keeps taking her out to the widows and orphans office to “help”, which means she sits and reads through all the Little Women books and listens to the radio, while I am left with Mrs H so I can listen to her talking about her womb. Then Ma feels sorry for me, so guess what I am doing to get out of the house? Because the doctor said I must keep my leg muscles active only it mustn’t be something, I’ve forgotten what word he said, but anyway I am allowed to go riding EVERY DAY except Sundays. And the riding teacher here is MILES better than Hetty B, and the pony she lets me ride is miles better than Lurch…_

Nicola grinned at their shared nickname for the beast the stables called Toby.

_… and yesterday she said I was starting to look like an actual rider and not like a circus sea-lion sitting on a wooden block with a trumpet clasped in its flipper. So by summer I should be a super-fab rider. It’s a shame you won’t be able to ride at Finchley as well, but maybe Ma might let us have some lessons near the farm_

_Speaking of, what do you think? Gin says she doesn’t care either way, but she’s just sicklied over with the pale thought of cast, as Kay once said. I should think Rowan’s pretty sick, isn’t she?_

Nicola pondered Ma’s announcement that they would be spending the whole summer holiday at Cousin Jon’s farm, then pondered Rowan’s holiday existence, which involved playing badminton practically every day then going to the coffee bar with her badminton friends; and thought that Rowan wasn’t having a very good year for friends, what with one thing and another. Come to that, she would rather have had at least half the holiday in London herself. Miranda West, who was getting positively matey, had suggested that they might meet up and frivol together, and she had thought it would be rather fun. Oh well. At least Cousin Jon had a dog, and walking a dog was always a pleasure. 

_I have to go now before my hand drops off. Make sure you tell Tim to put the geog and biol in Tennyson not Shakespeare, and if Kempe says anything again about doing the P and the P scenes at parents evening being too much for me, kill her. Tell her I am massively strong and healthy and feeling like a racing greyhound just spotting the hare. Give my love to K, R and A._

Nicola glanced from the letter to today’s section of In Memoriam, and thanked her lucky stars, as she did every week, that they didn’t have to read the lot. Still, before she forgot… 

>   
> _I passed beside the reverend walls_  
>  In which of old I wore the gown;  
> From ‘the’ to ‘gown’ is what we calls  
> A noun phrase; ‘walls’ is just a noun….  
> 

Nicola sat for quite a long time, thinking. There were so many things about school that she had never realized, however many questions she asked her sisters. No one had told her, for example – the memory of stewed prunes fresh in her memory – that at school you will eat food you never even liked before you got there, and ask for second helpings as well. No one had told her that school was school and home was home, and home didn’t seem quite real when you were at school, even with Lawrie in it. I mean, here was Lawrie having riding lessons with someone she didn’t even know and maybe never would. No one had told her how much things could hurt at school, or about the strange things that helped you get over them. No one had told her what it feels like to play a game and have everyone congratulating you afterwards, and how hard it is to know what to do with your face while they were doing it. Maybe no one ever could really tell you what something was like. She stood up, feeling pleasantly tired. Even a match against the combined seconds involved some effort. And the faint shadow of the Easter holidays, that had hung over her even during the fun times of the last three and a half weeks, suddenly left her. Somehow, she thought, she would make sure Lawrie ended the term in the A form where she belonged. She just felt in her bones that this would turn out to be a good term. 


End file.
